Summary
We’ve all encountered the dreaded lifegain player inMagic: The Gathering. They sit down to the Commander pod, and before you know it they’re in the triple digits for lift, the game is taking six hours, and the only way you can take them out is commander damage.
Fortunately, there are ways to put the kibosh on that. Shut down their lifegain with these cards, and they’ll be just as squishy and vulnerable as the rest of the table.
10Atarka’s Command
Almost Too Much Choice
Generally, cards that only prevent life for a single turn pale in comparison to ones that can do it permanently. But Atarka’s Command stands above them by the sheer amount of flexibility it provides.
You can not only prevent lifegain for your opponents, but you could also put a land onto the battlefield, give you creatures +1/+1 and reach, or deal three damage to each opponent at the same time. For two mana, that is a fantastic amount of value, and a well-timed play could switch off a lifegain combo like Walking Ballista and Heliod.
9Roiling Vortex
Pay For Your Spells, Or Else
You need to pay one red mana each turn you want to turn off lifegain, which isn’t as effective as a permanent restriction. But Roiling Vortex offers other abilities that make it an attractive choice for a deck for just two mana.
Particularly in Commander, casting spells without paying any mana is surprisingly common. It could be flipping a battle, cascading, a suspended spell going off, or anything with retrace or rebound. Punishing your opponents for this with five damage to the face, especially when they can’t regain it, can be tricky for them to work around.
8Leyline Of Punishment
Planting Your Flag In The Ground
Leyline of Punishment is a declaration. You’re slapping it down before the first card has even been drawn, and are announcing that nobody will be gaining life, and that you’ll be spending the rest of the game kicking your opponents’ heads in.
The downside to Leyline of Punishment is that it also prevents you from gaining life, but you’re playing in red. If going fast and ignoring the consequences isn’t in your plan, you’re not doing it right. After all, who needs to gain life once everyone else is dead?
7Quakebringer
A Giant Pain In The Butt
An underrated card from Kaldheim, Quakebringer provides you a shockingly easy way of dishing out damage every turn. Even better is that, as long as it’s on the battlefield, your opponents can’t gain life. There’s no additional costs or hoops to jump through, Quakebringer just shuts that nonsense down.
Even after Quakebringer is dead, it can be causing issues. If you control a Mountain and a Giant, the damage Quakebringer deals continues as if nothing happens, even if it’s sat in your graveyard. It’s a slow win, but it is a win.
6Everlasting Torment
Wither Away
Like Leyline of Punishment, Everlasting Torment will stop you gaining life alongside your opponents. However, Everlasting Torment adds two extra lines of text that make it very appealing.
With it, damage can’t be prevented. No more cheeky Fogs keeping opponents out of combat, now every point of damage will be harshly felt. On top of that, all damage is now dealt with wither, meaning it remains on creatures as -1/-1 counters instead of temporary damage that heals in the end step.
With wither, you’ve got an easy way to deal with indestructible creatures, or removing +1/+1 counters from opponents’ creatures.
5Rampaging Ferocidon
Make Your Opponents Dino-Sore
Dinosaurs are a creature type witha huge amount of support, especially with the launch of The Lost Caverns Of Ixalan and its dino-centric Commander deck. But even without all the support backing up Rampaging Ferocidon, it on its own can shut down a lot of plays.
It’s not just lifegain Ferocidon turns off. It also actively punishes go-wide players by having them take one damage whenever a creature enters under their control. If someone’s going ham with a Scute Swarm, or doing white’s usual trick of blinking things to gain lots of life, Rampaging Ferocidon could easily wipe them out.
4Knight Of Dusk’s Shadow
The Best Bang For Your Black
One of the cheapest ways to prevent lifegain is with the two-mana Knight of Dusk’s Shadow. To make it even better, Knight of Dusk’s Shadow only prevents your opponents gaining life; you’re free to carry on ticking up your total as much as you like.
A 2/2 creature is easily removed, but you may pump mana to make it bigger, or you’re in black and have no shortage of ways to recur it. Knight of Dusk’s Shadow might not be flashy, but everything it does is fantastic value, and should be an auto-include in any black deck needing to deal with lifegain.
3The Lord Of Pain
Do You Want To Play A Game?
First printed inDuskmourn’s Commander decks, The Lord Of The Pain is Magic’s take on the Saw movies, and it really wants your opponents to hurt each other for your amusement.
As well as disabling lifegain, The Lord Of Pain lets you take the mana value of the first spell a player casts each turn and dish out that much damage to somebody else. Big spells are going to be very juicy for this, of course, but also small things like counterspells and other interaction will get the damage flowing.
And with that first line of text, The Lord Of Pain makes sure every hit your opponents take will be permanent.
2Erebos, God Of The Dead
Only You Can Gain Life
Like The Lord Of Pain, Erebos shows just how good it is to have a way to turn off lifegain sat in your command zone. It’s always available to you, but Erebos comes with the added bonus of being indestructible.
It isn’t as immediately scary as The Lord Of Pain, but Erebos can quietly sit back as your opponents fail to gain their life back and tick, tick, tick down to zero. It even has a way to let you gain hand advantage by paying life, and you’re the only person at the table who can gain it back.
1Screaming Nemesis
Get Wrecked For The Rest Of The Game
The big flaw of every other card that prevents lifegain is that it needs to be on the battlefield to work. They become lightning rods for removal, and the white player who is trying to gain Graham’s Number worth of life also likely has a Path to Exile in hand.
Not Screaming Nemesis, though. If you’re able to find a way to deal damage to it, it can trigger and prevent a player from gaining any life for the rest of the game. You could force something to block Nemesis, or cycle a Jund Sojourners, or sacrifice a Goblin Arsonist. As long as you can get some damage on Screaming Nemesis, your opponents are down a strategy permanently.
Magic: The Gathering
Created by Richard Garfield in 1993, Magic: The Gathering (MTG) has become one of the biggest tabletop collectible card games in the world. Taking on the role of a Planeswalker, players build decks of cards and do battle with other players. In excess of 100 additional sets have added new cards to the library, while the brand has expanded into video games, comics, and more.
